Economic Beat

Fewer Hours, Reduced Hopes

The Great Recession sparked a surge in part-time labor, but the number of full-time employees is far below its peak.

Apart from bankruptcy law, which requires credentials most of us lack, work that gets even more abundant when recession strikes is usually hard to find. But the Great Recession, while inflicting punishment on one broad category of labor, lent a boost to another kind of work.

We are referring here to part-time work, defined as requiring less than 35 hours a week to perform. In fact, there has been a mini-revolution in part-time employment since the onset of this recession, and the consequences have been mixed. On the plus...